We need a Disney princess who hates herself
In defense of TV's favorite rich blonde lesbian
It’s a refrain I’ve heard since I came out at sixteen: I don’t want being gay to be my whole personality. I heard it from my college roommate, a lesbian cheerleader, and from my first girlfriend, whose parents thought I was just a friend. Most recently, I saw this sentiment embodied by Leighton Murray, a character on the HBO show The Sex Lives of College Girls. In the first season of the show, Leighton, played by Renee Rapp, is a closeted college student who has built up a mean girl façade to keep anyone from getting close enough to learn her secret. She hooks up with older women using an anonymous profile on a dating app. Leighton ends up serving school-mandated volunteer hours at the campus women’s center, where she meets people who do, so to speak, make being gay their whole personalities.
Over the last few years, I have noticed the rise of a new queer trope in teen television. In 2020, there were Sterling Wesley and April Stevens in Netflix’s Teenage Bounty Hunters, rivals from wealthy Southern families who eventually kiss in their Christian teen fellowship office. Later that year came The Wilds on Prime Video, which introduced Shelby Goodkind, a Texan pageant queen who, when stranded on a desert island, starts dating a girl. In 2021, we got Leighton. The latter hails from NYC, not the South, but her storyline sends the same message as the other characters: pretty blonde girls can be gay too. I don’t consider this message as progressive as the respective showrunners seem to think it is, but I do think femme lesbians from conservative families is necessary representation that has been lacking in media until recently.
Leighton and April’s stories are particularly unique in that their narratives don’t revolve around the characters realizing they’re gay. They understand they’re lesbians long before the show begins. Both of them, however, have also accepted that they will have to hide their sexualities in order to maintain normalcy in their lives. April plans to attend college outside the South and date girls without telling her conservative family. Leighton is already in college with no plans to come out, even going on a date with her brother’s male friend to appease him. Neither character struggles with kissing or dating girls. They are unequivocally lesbians. What they do struggle with is the question of whether coming out will mean sacrificing their sense of self. “I like who I am,” Leighton tells a girl she’s dating. “I don’t want to come out and become all political and have it affect how I act and speak and dress and what things I do.”
You could definitely interpret this sentiment as internalized homophobia: I don’t want to be gay in the way that you’re gay. But I think it stems from another struggle that feminine gay women face, which is inflicted by the LGBTQ community just as often as it is by heteronormativity—being told that you don’t seem queer enough.
Right after I came out, I had a class with someone who brought up their sexuality every time they raised their hand. I remember complaining to friends about it, not because I thought it was wrong to talk freely about being queer, but because I wondered what their behavior said about me, a less visibly queer person in the class. I wondered if they mentioned being queer so much because they thought they were the only one. It frustrated me to think I would be overlooked if I didn’t make it as obvious as they had. I would venture to guess many other newly out femmes have felt the same way—torn between wanting to feel comfortable in their sexuality and wanting their current self to be an accepted presentation of queerness. My cheerleader roommate got hit on repeatedly by men who already knew she was a lesbian. At the same time, queer people in our circle were telling her, “I never would have guessed you were gay,” and pressuring her to present differently.
As new LGBTQ celebrities rise to fame and more rainbow apparel appears in stores every June, the portrayal of queerness in the public eye has become increasingly egotistical. Some people, namely Pete Buttigieg, have built their careers around disassociating queerness from progressive politics and solidarity with marginalized groups. The ethos of his entire presidential campaign was essentially, I’m gay but I’m just like you. Other public figures have built their images around their queerness in a way that absolves them from responsibility for any other political stances, like Rupaul or (sorry) Jojo Siwa. A third group aligns themselves noncommittally with the community without shouldering any of the obstacles of being publicly queer á la Harry Styles and Conan Gray. To me, all of this amounts to piss-poor representation for the majority of closeted teenagers. What I imagine would help the Leightons of the world is more people whose public-facing image incorporates their sexuality into three-dimensional, non-victimized personhood.
***THE SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS FINALE SPOILERS AHEAD***
In the second season of SLOCG, Leighton becomes that person for herself. She comes out to her roommates and father, emphasizing to them that she hasn’t changed—not because being a lesbian isn’t a part of who she is, but because it always has been. She quits her sorority when an alum makes transphobic comments and convinces her mom to donate to the women’s center instead. She breaks up with Tatum, another blonde snob from New York, when she’s too judgmental about other queer people. “Maybe dating you has made me realize that the things we have in common are the things I want to change about myself,” Leighton tells her. She’s more comfortable with herself than ever, but her attitude toward trans and nonbinary people has also evolved—when she’s first asked for her pronouns at the women’s center, Leighton says, “She, obviously.” Leighton has realized who she’s actually in community with and stood up for them, a move that neither makes her sexuality her whole personality nor makes it meaningless.
The Sex Lives of College Girls has its shortcomings—the second season is way too fast-paced—but Leighton’s storyline is one of the freshest portrayals of a queer girl coming into her own that I’ve seen on TV.